Concentrating therapeutic cells and transferring them from one solution into another (usually referred to as washing) are two processes involved at multiple stages of production and use of the cells. The washing and separation of materials in cellular processing is an important part of the overall efficacy of the cell therapy of choice. In particular, therapeutic cells may originally be suspended in a growth serum or in preservative materials like dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO). Separating the cells from these fluids so the cells can be further processed is important in the overall therapeutic process of using such cellular materials. In one example, the cells are typically recovered from a bioreactor, concentrated, and transferred from culture media into an electroporation buffer prior to transduction, such as in manufacturing CAR-T cells. After expansion of cells at the final manufacturing step, they are concentrated and transferred into an appropriate solvent depending on the desired application.
Therapeutic cells are stored in specialized media to prolong the viability of these cells either through refrigeration and or freezing processes. Such specialized media may not be compatible when the therapeutic cells are introduced into a patient. It may thus be helpful to both wash and concentrate the therapeutic cells in a buffer or wash media that is biocompatible with both the therapeutic cells and with the patient. These washing and concentration processes conventionally involve the use of centrifugation and physical filtration. The washing step may be repeated a number of times. For example, the specialized media (which can be pyrogenic or otherwise harmful) may be fully removed with multiple wash steps, and the cells may be suspended in a new buffer or wash solution. During this washing process, many of the cells are degraded or destroyed through the centrifugation and physical filtration processes. Moreover, the filtration process can be rather inefficient and may entail a non-sterile intrusion into the environment for batch processing, whereby the cell culture is exposed to possible pathogens or outside cellular influences that would be harmful to the target cell culture. Further yet, with these physical filtration processes, biological waste is generated through the use of multiple physical filters which may incur additional steps for proper disposal. The cost and timeliness of this process is also not conducive to a fast or low-cost process of preparing the cells for introduction to the patient.